The Butterfly Effect

Magnifying small differences.

See this.

In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.

This phenomenon may help explain why, for example, different areas and nations and peoples of Europe are so different in culture and society when there are not huge genetic differences there and why on an individual level, White people typically are not that different.

Human cognitive – e.g., intelligence and behavior, etc. – traits, like most traits, exist on a bell curve.  The bell curves of closely related ethnies are not going to be markedly different, but may be shifted to a small degree in one direction of the other. These small differences, amplified over the large numbers of people in an ethny and synergizing through all the complex interactions between them, and amplified over long periods of historical time, “can result in large differences in a later state” of the final outcome of what we see in each society.  There is gene-culture cross-talk, influencing each other, further amplifying initial state effects – genetics select cultures and cultures select genes. The same cross-talk occurs between innate traits and the physical environment – the environment selects genes while the traits derived from those genes can work on the environment to alter it to suit particular people’s needs. Further, even when the bell curves shift slightly, this can have a large impact on the numbers of people at the far ends of each curve at given metric points, so that the numbers of geniuses or retards can be more marked than average IQ, or the numbers of highly individualistic or collectivist people can change be markedly than the average. These outlier fractions can have a disproportionate impact on societal trajectories through “butterfly effect” mechanisms.  Thus, the naïve idea that significant differences on observed societies correlate to equal sized differences in innate traits of the mass populations is likely not true.

When such populations are placed in a common novel environment, like America, much, if not all, of the differences observed in their native habitats vanish, as the innate differences are not sufficient to result in really noticeable differences in outcome in the time periods heretofore available for observation.

On the other hand, populations that are genetically very divergent – such as different continent population groups (races) – would be so different in innate traits that even in the American contest, the differences are obvious and consistently reproducible. For example, Negroes are a catastrophe wherever they are.